5/21/07: Terrorvision “Didn’t Bleed Red” (1996)Every pathetic Britpop act had an American record deal in 1996—except for Terrorvision, whose
Regular Urban Survivors was only available as an import. To be fair, Terrorvision had sold poorly in the States with earlier releases. This was still the first great album from a promising band. It even deserved the album’s trappings of ’70s-styled action mayhem.
Regular Urban Survivors is nicely packaged as a soundtrack to the kind of film that required artwork on the movie poster to cover for a real low budget. (There was a time when you could trust any album with this kind of cover art. Man’s
The Welsh Connection and The Tarney-Spencer Band’s
Run For Your Life are highly recommended.) The accompanying songs pull off the motif, too. There’s no room for sentimentality on cinematic epics such as “Hide The Dead Girl” and “Bad Actress.” The album should close with the brilliance of “Celebrity Hit List,” but the band has a last important thought about choosing sides with “Mugwump.”
And then there’s “Didn’t Bleed Red,” which sums up the unspoken politics that propel the other numbers. “The aliens are coming,” we’re told at the start, and the creeps don’t even have the decency to first send
a buxom blonde as a diplomatic overture. In fact, we’re told that these invaders “never asked for our advice in any shape or form.”
We also “can’t do anything to please them.” Yes, we’ve heard that Britain has some kind of problem like that with aliens.
“Didn’t Bleed Red” is a song with true attitude and a better philosophy. These aliens don’t seem interested in anything but the worst kind of assimilation for our heroes. And yet the vocalist gives equal time to a hectoring voice discouraging self-defense. The exchange of dialogue goes like this:
“What’d you do that for?
They were only coming to meet us”
“You don’t know that
They may have been coming to beat us
Didn’t bleed red
Better off dead”Let's concede that lyrics seldom read well by themselves. Still, how great is that simple declaration that the aliens’ defender is speaking with unwarranted conviction? ‘You don’t know that.” Use that phrase in more debates with Leftists, and you’ll be reminded of how much they’re willing to gamble on their sensitive intuition. Aliens love that people want to indulge some sensitive intuition. It lets them get away with all kinds of crap.
Consumer warning: As noted, you can no longer trust that kind of sensational ’70s graphic design. There are plenty of ad campaigns ripping off the look nowadays—although all the art directors seem to think they’re merely spoofing
Starsky & Hutch. What they’ve really been doing is rehashing rip-offs of the Beastie Boys’ video for “Sabotage.” That was from 1994, so Terrorvision got lucky with nailing the concept two years later.
Make it your own: We’re outraged that you can
get this unheralded greatness for so cheap. Good news for everyone else, though.
